How did you find your startup idea?

I build two web products that weren’t taking of. So instead of shooting in the dark a third time I decided to scout the marketplace (envato codecanyon) for popular products that had room for improvement.

Eventually I landed on an image cropper plugin that had a very developer oriented UI.

So I build my own image cropper that had similar features but a nicer more user oriented UI, better animations (which I learned while building my failed products), and then launched.

Now five years later I work on my image editor component (Doka Image Editor) full time.

It's been a problem I've had for years but never found the solution.

I've Googled these terms 1,000 of times with no success:

• "4 day per week software engineer jobs"
• "part time remote software developer jobs"
• "remote near full time software jobs"

So instead, I just built the thing I was looking for (i.e. fourdayweek.io)

The best startup idea is a problem you have yourself.
A couple of years ago, I was comparing the prices of similar products on several e-commerce sites before deciding where to buy from. Then I thought, what if I could automate all this?
That's how I've got into web scraping and started building DataGrab (https://datagrab.io). But the market is highly competitive with lots of great tools out there, so as an indie maker, you have to pick a narrow (but still profitable) niche. So now, as a "spin-off" product of DataGrab (a case study), I'm building a remote programming jobs aggregator called Nomad Coder (https://nomadcoder.work).
@csallen had an excellent point in one of his podcasts: start building something (can be literally anything), then you'll come across tools you need (account management, email automation, etc.), then start building THOSE.

I created a problem validation platform for that.

As PG and others here would tell you it's the problem that matters as it's tangible, it's something which is present now and startup idea becomes real only when it solves that problem.

When a problem is identified, articulated to its fundamental level and there's enough need gap for that to be solved; ideas which can solve that could become successful startup ideas.

Who doesn't know it: print out PDFs, fill them out, scan them in again. This is not only a huge hassle for the person filling it out, but also for the person sending it.

Which Paperless.io we had a striking number of problems with documents (contracts, forms, agreements) of all kinds in our companies Mankido & Social Gorilla.

Recorded information was incorrect, faulty or missing. The form - all analog or photographed PDFs - were legally vulnerable. Processes were non-transparent, slow and had no connection to IT systems. The effort for all involved was disproportionate. Even minor adjustments to documents were always tedious. That's why we developed a digital solution.

Initially, we only wanted to create the perfect solution for a modern document workflow internally. A software through which working with contracts was basically easy and fast, where small and big changes could be implemented without any problems. Where you have perfect insight into running processes. Where the filling out was simply only possible correctly and completely - and that on any device from anywhere. The well-known solutions like DocuSign or Pandadoc did not go far enough for us here and no other provider could really meet the requirements.

After we had created the first prototype, it quickly became clear that it surpassed all existing tools by far.

I have a saying that goes like this: "don't look for ways to change the world, look at the world and find ways to change it". In other words, observe the world; find things that need to be fixed or improved; pick the one you think would do the best to the world; build it. As any good startuper, you'll fail several times over before finding "that" good idea.

When I was working on design projects, in the early days of my agency, there would be several back and forth rounds of web design changes. This involved long, boring threads of emails that would get delayed and tough to track.

Plus cross functional teams like designers developers wasted too much time in getting the design feedback right. I noticed that this process was getting even harder with more clients coming in. I found myself doing this feedback process manually for tens of hours on single project!

There were some tools in the market that helped collect design feedback but none of them allowed people to edit websites directly inside it.

And that's how I came up with the idea of https://ruttl.com/.

I do it every where). Sometime I just read posts comments like this one, or use special generator tools like https://floppyapp.com/idea/

Based on problems and my knowledge towards certain industry segment.

I started VenturesList because I can see a knowledge gap and inefficiency to approach venture investment particularly for early stage founders.

Like a lot of folks, it was an itch that I needed to scratch. But, the problem is a lot bigger for others. Thats what drives me and motivated me to create my application. So it was a mixture of a problem I had and some market research within my niche.

I wanted to have a deep insight into web metrics. Of course on the market there is a full list of that tools yet I wanted it done by my way, by my feeling of what's important so I created https://pagemtr.com :)

Still building it, but here's my answer - I worked nearly a decade as a freelancer and for companies that produce 3D content (interactive media, visual effects, animation, apparel, etc.) and recognized that every company has common problems. How do they organize their data and standardize workflows?

How are they doing it right now? Well, big studios hire teams of developers (a previous role of mine) to maintain custom code to manage it all. Big shops don't need help, they have solutions that work and the scale of data is far too large for a startup.

How about medium and small studios? What about indies? What about new markets like the explosion of studios offering e-commerce AR/VR, digital fashion, etc.?

They are struggling to scale production!

They employ terrible and expensive CMS solutions where employees must upload and download files by hand. They use project management solutions that are not connected to the actual data being produced. They create files and folder structures to keep things organized by hand, which inevitably results in "heroes" going through cleaning them up regularly because people are terrible at following instructions. Oh and worst of all, they will EMAIL files to each other when they can't find them; security nightmare!

"That's a Bingo!"

My current opportunity is taking something of which I have valuable domain knowledge (organization CG workflows and data) and applying it to industries that do not yet have a viable solution and/or do not know how to fix it themselves.

The idea for https://www.clap.team started as something we were already doing at Slack across a few of our engineering teams. Every week we were recognizing someone from the team, but I noticed how important that data was when management continued to change and new folks stepping in were unaware of what we have already accomplished for each other and the team.

TLDR; I made a manual process that our team's were already doing a lot less manual and a lot more helpful.

My partner-in-crime @signorettif and I are working on Adflow,. You can think of Adflow as copy.ai but with a vertical focus on advertisement (and we also do images 🙌).

We are still honing in on the final vision for the product (we are in the process of looking for users for our free private beta – DM me if you'd like an invite), however the project stems from a combination of our experiences so far. I worked in digital advertisement at Google for 3 years, Francesco has been around scaled AI infrastructures both in his current capacity and in the past.

We always wanted to do something together and Adflow checks all the boxes ✅.

I was blogging in Medium and when I decided to leave that where I found static blogging. The generator I use now is Hugo. It's crazy fast and loads instantly instead of 4MB download.

But I feel like the engagement rate is very low. I decide to bring clap and comments to my blog. Existing solutions polluting my static blog experience and I decode decided to write my own. That's where this idea came to me. It's called Blogstreak.

Just two lines of code you can have working clap and comments in your blog. blogstreak.com

Increasingly seeing this as:

1. Find out what you love doing.
2. Find people who want it.

#1 is not easy.
#2 is getting easier.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/great-news-now-its-all-about-you-e2a030bee3

That's what I write at Micro SaaS Ideas to 3400 subscribers every week.